Chapter 7
Lester Spinney sat in his car, watching a three-story house about halfway down the block. He knew the owner of record, a local garage mechanic who also ran a wrecker service. Except that his knowledge of the man came more from his history of petty drug busts. Nathan Sherman, nicknamed Natty for no reason related to his appearance, had been a steady customer of the Springfield police since his early teens, and he was in his mid-forties now.
But as popular as he was with the cops, he was genuinely so with the local teens. Two of these were his own sons, the older of whom had begun to build a record all his own.
Not hard-core stuff. The son, Jeff, had been charged with disturbing the peace, petty vandalism, loitering with intent, multiple vehicular offenses. And in a perfect example of a father-son tradition, minor drug offenses. Never heroin or crack or even the higher profile pills. But certainly a lot of marijuana, called weed by the kids, had passed through the house, and that was only what the police could actually prove. The law of averages dictated that what they'd missed was the vast majority.
Spinney's problem was that his own son, David, was now inside.
He checked his watch in the dark, using a nearby streetlight to see. He wasn't in his own car. He'd borrowed a neighbor's on some flimsy excuse. He hadn't wanted Dave to see him staking him out.
It was almost ten o'clock.
He rubbed his eyes with his fingertips. He knew he wasn't acting rationally. He knew that the solution to all this was to talk to Dave and to ask him what was going on.
And yet he now sat in a borrowed car, running a surveillance as if he were building a case.
He hadn't found anything incriminating in Dave's room when he'd searched it earlier that day. Just a growing guilt, clinging like a sticky cobweb to all of his son's belongings. He had discovered hidden pictures of nude women, one stashed pornographic book. But instead of being touched by his son's normalcy and discretion, Lester only felt increasingly burdened by his own sense of failure. His son was acting on the hormones of any sixteen-year-old boy, while Lester had somehow jumped the tracks, ignoring everything about Dave except a vague and unsubstantiated possibility of drug use.
And now he was sitting in the dark, watching the shadows play across the curtains of the Sherman home, worrying about what might be occurring inside.
What had his own father been like? An icon of sorts, albeit a working-class one. Spinney had been born and brought up in Springfield, the heart of Vermont's so-called Precision Valley. Things had been invented in this region that became mainstays of the whole world's daily activities, from interchangeable gun parts, to the steam shovel, to the common spring clothespin. Early Vermonters were practical, hands-on problem solvers, and had bred a generational string of like-minded people. Over time, Springfield became the cradle of huge, expensive, very exacting machine tools-the type of equipment that manufacturers across the country and elsewhere needed to make their own machines. These were tools made to almost infinitesimal tolerances, and the workers who produced them carried their expectations to all aspects of their lives. When Lester's dad bought a car, he drove it around for a while, discussed its attributes with his friends, and then jacked it up onto a lift to perhaps rebuild the transmission to his own standards. He was a man in blue jeans and a white T-shirt who walked with the respect of his peers in a town whose various boards were dominated by engineers wearing pocket protectors. The 1950s lasted forever in Springfield, it seemed, preserving the town and its residents in a protective time bubble.
Until it all fell apart with a crash.
There are various debatable reasons for this, depending on who's got the podium. The economy, the fallout from the sixties and Vietnam, the unions and the strikes against the local plants, the flight of corporations for foreign shores, life in general, the Democratic Party.
Whatever.
In any case, Springfield's machine-tools market drained away, and with it, the town's lifeblood. What Lester remembered most, however, was how baffled the whole place became, almost overnight, like a huge ship whose rudder had been suddenly blown off. Friends fell out, relatives became polarized, the bars began doing a booming business, and domestic abuse became a recreational pursuit. The sons and daughters of those T-shirted men spun out and away from the cocoon everyone had taken for granted, leaving behind a stunned community
As for the Spinney family, the once-admired, benignly taciturn father became dour, anxious, and clearly directionless, leaving a leadership void his wife couldn't fill. Lester gave it his best, being firstborn, trying to be cheerful and supportive as the household unraveled. He got so good at steering people to look on the bright side that he was the last one to come to grips with his parents' divorce and his father's struggle with alcoholism. By the time he woke up, all he had left was a reputation for being upbeat, an attribute he felt had all the fragility of an orchid.
But it became his signature characteristic. It got him jobs, friends, his wife, and the fondness of his children. And for most of the time, it even worked, especially since things had more or less gone his way. Working for the state police, then the AG's office, and finally the VBI, Lester Spinney had led a charmed life.
Only when he hit the occasional adversity was he reminded of the shallowness of this vaunted optimism. Normally, all it took was a few hours to rebuild. But this time, right now, whether it was his age or David's age-the same as his own at the time of his family's collapse-or perhaps his growing exposure to drugs and their destructive effect, Lester wasn't bouncing back. From the moment he'd received that phone call from Officer Walker, the emotional pull on his psyche had been comparable to quicksand. He was feeling alone and speechless, his only visible resource being his training as a cop.
He passed his hand across his forehead, struck anew by the realization of what he was doing-sitting in the dark, substituting communication with surveillance.
He caught sight of himself in the rearview mirror. "You are one crazy son of a bitch, you know that?" he murmured.
He started the car and headed home, not casting a further glance at the Sherman home.
* * *
Holyoke, Massachusetts, is the home of the Volleyball Hall of Fame, an incongruity lifted to Olympian heights by an actual visit to the city. For if ever there was an image associated with a sport, it couldn't be more at odds with this city. Holyoke is, in a sequence of contrasting images, a stalwart, brick-and-granite icon of faded nineteenth-century industrial might; a city trying to adapt by building duplexes where once there were factories; a monument to the arsonist's craft, with enough rubble-strewn empty lots to recall newsreels of bombed-out Berlin of late 1945; the proud parent of one of the largest shopping malls in New England; the near title holder in Massachusetts for high crime and unemployment; and a case study in how outdated the region's WASP reputation had become, with a now nearly 50 percent Hispanic population.
In short, the portrait of Holyoke presents like a splayed-out collection of unrelated postcards: genteel, leafy suburbia; gutted urban relic; lofty, graceful Victorian mansion; and embracing, blue-collar, 1950s neighborhood. The jarring thing is that these contrasts often fit into a single city block. Schools are next to crack houses, which are opposite tourist stops that overlook ruins. To the casual onlooker, this sociological chaos is only punctuated by the gap-toothed look of the place-there are so many missing buildings, prey to either fire or the wrecker's ball, that the eye can see much farther than expected, all the way to countless walls of boarded-up or bricked-over windows.
Holyoke is startlingly eccentric as cities go, and despite the bright face its chamber of commerce advertises, a place of staggering disadvantages.